Saturday, December 3, 2011

Introduction

A few years ago, a lot of PC monitors had an aspect ratio of 4:3 you couldn’t imagine 16:9 or 16:10 monitors or others that go around today. So when you were to deploy a game; you designed your GUI following this aspect ratio. If you were to level up the screen resolution, the aspect ratio was the same and there wasn’t any kind of problems. Things got a little bit complicated when plasma and LCD monitors showed up and mobile device acquired more popularity. Nowadays, when you design a game, you have to cover all the odds, and that means your game has to support if not all, the most screen resolutions you can.
You may think that almost any device supports a 640X480(4:3 Aspect Ratio) pixel resolution and a game designed in this resolution may work in all environments, which may be true but imagine how it will look like in a 24-inch monitor with a 16:9 Aspect Ratio; Besides nowadays, LCD monitors are the most popular and they only look fine at its native resolution. This article proposes a small solution to this problem.
First let’s take a look of the most popular screen resolutions nowadays: